SEO, Your Website & You: 5 Myths & 10 Tips

Client: So I heard Google's Matt Cutts said links are [dead/bad/over], so I stopped all my link building, fired my SEO agency, and wanted to ask you what we should do next.

Mind BlownMe: (long pause) Umm, you did what? Were you penalized or positioning badly?

Client: Oh no, ranking in the top 3 for most of our keywords, great traffic, but you know I have been reading a little and then I saw Matt said to stop all link building, so I thought I better do that.

Me: Ummmm. OK, no...

Amazingly, even in 2014, many people have heard bits of information about websites and search engine optimization (SEO) that are either no longer relevant, completely misplaced, or simply erroneous. These all need to die really horrible deaths.

SEO Mythbusting

Myths can start so easily and quickly become pervasive. Listening to them can do some serious damage to your site or business. So let's review five of the most common myths.

Myth 1: If You Build it, They Will Come

This is a favorite mantra of the content marketing. Just build an amazing website with even more amazing content and watch the traffic roll on in.

Really? Well, no.

If it were that easy, all SEO professionals would be writers or out of work. Unfortunately, while great writing and great content is a large part of SEO and something your site definitely needs, it also needs links, a strong technical base, fast page downloads, and the list goes on and on.

Create content, but other SEO tactics are needed unless you want to be sitting all alone in a big field.

Myth 2: Link Building is Dead

While Cutts would prefer you never build another link to your website, this isn't "Field of Dreams". You can build it, but it doesn't mean traffic will come to your site.

First, Cutts never said links were dead. In fact, it's quite the opposite.

Cutts said Google has tried excluding links from the algorithm and the results were "much worse." So while I don't think it will stay forever this way, we have years before it potentially could go away, according to Cutts.

Links aren't dead. You need links. What do you do?

You don't want to go to a link farm and buy links and get your site potentially penalized because that method is dead (unless you really, really know what you're doing or using "churn and burn" domains).

However, you can hire someone with experience to go create a strategic link acquisition plan and help you implement it. This means that you use strategic methods to acquire links in a way that would appear natural.

For example, let's say you sponsor a charity event every year, making sure to tie that in with local news, press coverage, and maybe the charity's own news release. All tied back to you. This is a very obvious way you can acquire natural links to your site that are part of a link building campaign, but NOT a link buying campaign.

A link builder will have many more inventive and fantastic ways to do this and the best part, it will all appear completely natural because basically they are, just with a little push. Most important to note, this is the most highly scrutinized area of SEO right now, so hire well.